06/06/07 "ICH" -- -- The war in Iraq is lost. This fact is
widely recognized by American military officers and has been
recently expressed forcefully by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the
commander of US forces in Iraq during the first year of the
attempted occupation. Winning is no longer an option. Our best
hope, Gen. Sanchez says, is “to stave off defeat,” and that
requires more intelligence and leadership than Gen. Sanchez sees
in the entirety of our national political leadership: “I am
absolutely convinced that America has a crisis in leadership at
this time.”

More evidence that the war is lost arrived June 4 with headlines
reporting: “U.S.-led soldiers control only about a third of
Baghdad, the military said on Monday.” After five years of war
the US controls one-third of one city and nothing else.

A host of US commanding generals have said that the Iraq war is
destroying the US military. A year ago Colin Powell said that
the US Army is “about broken.” Lt. Gen. Clyde Vaughn says Bush
has “piecemealed our force to death.” Gen. Barry McCafrey
testified to the US Senate that “the Army will unravel.”

Col. Andy Bacevich, America’s foremost writer on military
affairs, documents in the current issue of The American
Conservative that Bush’s insane war has depleted and exhausted
the US Army and Marine Corps:

“Only a third of the regular Army’s brigades qualify as
combat-ready. In the reserve components, none meet that
standard. When the last of the units reaches Baghdad as part of
the president’s strategy of escalation, the US will be left
without a ready-to-deploy land force reserve.”

“The stress of repeated combat tours is sapping the Army’s
lifeblood. Especially worrying is the accelerating exodus of
experienced leaders. The service is currently short 3,000
commissioned officers. By next year, the number is projected to
grow to 3,500. The Guard and reserves are in even worse shape.
There the shortage amounts to 7,500 officers. Young West
Pointers are bailing out of the Army at a rate not seen in three
decades. In an effort to staunch the losses, that service has
begun offering a $20,000 bonus to newly promoted captains who
agree to stay on for an additional three years. Meanwhile, as
more and more officers want out, fewer and fewer want in: ROTC
scholarships go unfilled for a lack of qualified applicants.”

Bush has taken every desperate measure. Enlistment ages have
been pushed up from 35 to 42. The percentage of high school
dropouts and the number of recruits scoring at the bottom end of
tests have spiked. The US military is forced to recruit among
drug users and convicted criminals. Bacevich reports that wavers
“issued to convicted felons jumped by 30 percent.” Combat tours
have been extended from 12 to 15 months, and the same troops are
being deployed again and again.

There is no equipment for training. Bacevich reports that “some
$212 billion worth has been destroyed, damaged, or just plain
worn out.” What remains is in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Under these circumstances, “staying the course” means total
defeat.

Even the neoconservative warmongers, who deceived Americans with
the promise of a “cakewalk war” that would be over in six weeks,
believe that the war is lost. But they have not given up. They
have a last desperate plan: Bomb Iran. Vice President Dick
Cheney is spear- heading the neocon plan, and Norman Podhoretz
is the plan’s leading propagandist with his numerous pleas
published in the Wall Street Journal and Commentary to bomb
Iran. Podhoretz, like every neoconservative, is a total
Islamophobe. Podhoretz has written that Islam must be
deracinated and the religion destroyed, a genocide for the
Muslim people.

The neocons think that by bombing Iran the US will provoke Iran
to arm the Shiite militias in Iraq with armor-piercing rocket
propelled grenades and with surface to air missiles and unleash
the militias against US troops. These weapons would neutralize
US tanks and helicopter gunships and destroy the US military
edge, leaving divided and isolated US forces subject to being
cut off from supplies and retreat routes. With America on the
verge of losing most of its troops in Iraq, the cry would go up
to “save the troops” by nuking Iran.

Five years of unsuccessful war in Iraq and Afghanistan and
Israel’s recent military defeat in Lebanon have convinced the
neocons that America and Israel cannot establish hegemony over
the Middle East with conventional forces alone. The neocons have
changed US war doctrine, which now permits the US to
preemptively strike with nuclear weapons a non-nuclear power.
Neocons are forever heard saying, “what’s the use of having
nuclear weapons if you can’t use them.”

Neocons have convinced themselves that nuking Iran will show the
Muslim world that Muslims have no alternative to submitting to
the will of the US government. Insurgency and terrorism cannot
prevail against nuclear weapons.

Many US military officers are horrified at what they think would
be the worst ever orchestrated war crime. There are reports of
threatened resignations. But Dick Cheney is resolute. He tells
Bush that the plan will save him from the ignominy of losing the
war and restore his popularity as the president who saved
Americans from Iranian nuclear weapons. With the captive
American media providing propaganda cover, the neoconservatives
believe that their plan can pull their chestnuts out of the fire
and rescue them from the failure that their delusion has
wrought.

The American electorate decided last November that they must do
something about the failed war and gave the Democrats control of
both houses of Congress. However, the Democrats have decided
that it is easier to be complicit in war crimes than to
represent the wishes of the electorate and hold a rogue
president accountable. If Cheney again prevails, America will
supplant the Third Reich as the most reviled country in recorded
history.

Paul Craig Roberts wrote the Kemp-Roth bill and was assistant
secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was
associate editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and
contributing editor of National Review. He is author or
co-author of eight books, including The Supply-Side Revolution
(Harvard University Press). He has held numerous academic
appointments, including the William E. Simon chair in political
economy, Center for Strategic and International Studies,
Georgetown University, and senior research fellow, Hoover
Institution, Stanford University. He has contributed to numerous
scholarly journals and testified before Congress on 30
occasions. He has been awarded the U.S. Treasury's Meritorious
Service Award and the French Legion of Honor. He was a reviewer
for the Journal of Political Economy under editor Robert Mundell

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